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Aerochrome ~ #1: WGD ‘Rainbow’ 48-hour Jam

It’s been a long while since I’ve posted anything, but let’s just gloss over that and pretend I’ve been active. More importantly, Warwick Game Design Society held another 48 hour game jam to celebrate the end of term a couple of weeks ago. So let’s delve deep into the game I made for that and assume January to June of this year never happened.

The theme was initially “Unexpected”, but to spite one of our members who perpetually wants the theme to be “Pride”, we made the secondary theme “Rainbow”. Close enough, right? My game opted most obviously for the “Rainbow” side of the theme, as you might see in the following screenshot:

It’s a strange fever dream of colour.

The basic idea of the game is that you control a spaceship and your goal is to fly into all of the Colour Bits distributed randomly in space to complete the (initially greyed-out) rainbow. Initially I went for one of those dodgy control schemes in which the spaceship flies in every direction without any resistance whatsoever, but that ended up being frustrating to play, so instead I made the ship controllable. There are 100 Colour Bits of each colour, so that’s an enormous 700 collectables up for grabs. At least they’re not Koroks.

It’s not the fanciest game I’ve ever made by any stretch of the imagination, but it is arguably complete. There’s even a win condition! I suppose if you fly off into the infinite void far enough and overflow the position vector of the ship so bad that the game crashes, that counts as a lose condition?

Wheeeeee!

The controls are basic – you can accelerate the ship, use its boosters and rotate in all directions. That’s pretty much it! Since I’m writing this days after making it, I can’t for the life of me remember what the controls are, but you’re smart – you’ll figure it out. It has controller support too if you dislike keyboards and mice.

I plan to touch a couple of things in the game up in the coming days; adding a title screen and a few more objects to float around in space are my priorities. I’ll continue to follow and evolve the low-poly style I’ve adopted. After I’ve done that, I’ll put up a download. Hope you look forward to it!